Computing Writer's Workshop Announcement: Spring 2004

Writing your thesis proposal or a paper for a conference? Writing your thesis? Interested in making your papers clearer? Want to learn how to referee papers for conferences and journals in computing? Then you may be interested in joining us for a "writer's workshop" this coming Spring semester.

Background

A writer's workshop is a group of people that meets periodically to offer each other constructive criticism on their writing. Many writers recommend this practice as a way to foster better writing skills. See http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~leavens/writers-workshop.html for more information.

Plan

The workshop will meet once per week; if there are enough students we will split the workshop, and I or another facilitator will help help us.

In the meetings we will discuss papers offered by participants, and read beforehand. We will start out with a few meetings where we discuss background topics such as:

• general advice about writing technical papers in English,
• what to read about writing,
• how to referee a technical paper for a computing journal or conference.

Time permitting, there will be an exercise in refereeing as well. After this you will start to act as a writer's workshop.

In the workshop each participant must:

• offer one draft of 10 pages or so for reading by the group, and
• will, every week, carefully read each paper offered and make comments.

Prerequisites

You must be a graduate student in Computer Science.

What To Do To Join

To join the seminar, please do the following

1. Send me e-mail with your schedule, so we can can schedule the first meeting and put you on a mailing list,
2. sign up for Com S 610 WW for 1 credit

The meetings will take place once a week, for 50 minutes, during Spring Semester. Watch for e-mail about the first meeting at the beginning of the semester.